Document Type
Interview
Abstract
[From Introduction]
Alan Waldis H. Chandler Davis Collegiate Professor in the Department of English and the Program in American Culture and the University of Michigan. (Note: H. Chandler Davis was a University of Michigan faculty member fired in 1954 and subsequently imprisoned for refusing to co-operate with the House Committee on Un-American Activities.) Renowned among established and emerging scholars of the U.S. literary left for his "encyclopedic" grasp of the field - not just as it stands embodied in published works, but as it lies hidden in private papers, personal correspondence, oral histories, and other subaltern sources scattered throughout the archives - Alan is equally well-known for his great personal generosity with his time, energy, and knowledge. His recently released book, Trinity of Passion: the Literary Left and the Anti-Fascist Crusade is the second volume in a three-part study of the U.S. literary left that has received considerable praise, including recently in The Nation. Wald's previous books include, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Fall of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (1987), James T. Farrell: The Revolutionary Socialist Years (1987), The Revolutionary Imagination (1983), as well as two collections of essays, The Responsibility of Intellectuals (1992), and Writing From the Left (1994), and Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left (2002), the inaugural volume in his current triptych.
Repository Citation
Ramsey, Joseph G.. "Reconstructing the 'Humanscape' of Left Culture and Commitment: An Interview with Alan Wald." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 8, no. 1, 2008, pp. 1–10. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol8/iss1/24